This article is about the historical figure. His birthplace has a granite marker, and the street is now called Johnny Appleseed Lane. Chapman’s mother, Johnny appleseed candy, died in 1776, shortly after giving birth to a second son, Nathaniel Jr.
In 1780, his father, Nathaniel, who was in the military, returned to Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where, in the summer of the same year, he married Lucy Cooley. Author Rosella Rice stated, “Johnny had one sister, Persis Broom, of Indiana. According to some accounts, an 18-year-old John persuaded his 11-year-old half-brother Nathaniel Cooley Chapman to go west with him in 1792. The duo apparently lived a nomadic life until their father brought his large family west in 1805 and met up with them in Ohio. The younger Nathaniel decided to stay and help their father farm the land. Shortly after the brothers parted ways, John began his apprenticeship as an orchardist under a Mr.
Crawford, who grew apples, thus inspiring Chapman’s life journey of planting apple trees. In 1800, at the age of 26, Chapman was in Licking River, Ohio. There are stories of Johnny Appleseed practicing his nurseryman craft in the area of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and of picking seeds from the pomace at Potomac River cider mills in the late 1790s. The popular image is of Johnny Appleseed spreading apple seeds randomly everywhere he went. In fact, he planted nurseries rather than orchards, built fences around them to protect them from livestock, left the nurseries in the care of a neighbor who sold trees on shares, and returned every year or two to tend the nursery.
In 1817, a bulletin of the Church of New Jerusalem printed in Manchester, England, was the first to publish a written report about Chapman. It described a missionary who traveled around the West to sow apple seeds and pass out books of the New Church. In 1819, Chapman was nearly killed in an accident in Ohio. One morning he was picking hops in a tree when he fell and caught his neck in the fork of the tree. Shortly after he fell, one of his helpers, eight-year-old John White, found him struggling in the tree.